A friend who grew up in an extended farm
family tells the story of a Sunday morning when his uncle and cousins were
leaving for church and their neighbor had an emergency involving a broken fence
and escaping cows. His uncle’s response was, “We can’t help you right now. We
have to go to Mass.”
Their fear of committing a mortal sin by missing Mass that day led them to ignore
the needs of their neighbor, who lost thirteen cows that day.

Any society, religious or secular, needs
rules to survive and to thrive. But when the rules become ends in themselves,
more important than the people involved, they can do more harm than good. Religious
rules and rituals can easily cross a line to something akin to magical gestures.
Something deep-seated in the human psyche seems to hearken back to primitive
beliefs that a god could be controlled by an exact series of words and
gestures.

The early Hebrews were surrounded by cultures who relied on ritual to placate
distant gods. The covenant with the one God was a far different thing, an
intimate relationship between God and the people of Israel. Moses’s exhortation to the
people to follow the Lord’s commands is clearly rooted in this covenant
relationship. The commandments flow out of and nurture that relationship. If we
are in right relationship with God, we will also be in right relationship with
one another.

By the time of Jesus, Moses’s command to carefully observe the
commandment had been distorted into restrictive rules and rubrics. This in spite
of Moses telling them not to add to the commandments he was giving them. Rabbis
over the centuries referred to this as “putting a fence around the Torah.” By
observing a growing number of rituals in order to avoid small sins, the people
were less likely to commit any major sin against the commandments.

The
intention here is certainly a worthy one. We see something of it in Jesus’ own
teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, when, for example, he counsels against
anger as a way of avoiding murder. But too often the minor rules had more to do
with merely external gestures than with a change of heart.

In today’s Gospel,
Jesus reminds his listeners that a clean heart is more important than clean
hands. And he reminds them that Isaiah and the other prophets warned against
claiming divine authority for merely human rules and precepts. Keeping a strict
set of rules can be far easier than dealing with the messiness inevitable in
human life and relationships. We don’t have to think, we don’t have to make
decisions, we don’t have to take any personal responsibility for consequences.
We rely on someone else telling us, “Do this. Don’t do that.”

Our Catholic
culture has certainly gone through periods of strict rulekeeping through the
centuries. But when those rules allow us to hold ourselves apart from the
suffering of another person, we have to ask ourselves if this is what Jesus
intended. At the heart of the Gospel message is the command to love God and
neighbor. No rule or ritual is more important than that. We need to keep this
in mind when faced with difficult decisions in our own lives.